Monday, 3 October 2011

Or rather to do party stuff, yes this of course is my obligatory blog about the fact I have now crossed over from the world of interesting and principled politics and dived head first into the world of bitter partisanship. I've got my card and everything. Well here's something of a blog on the party.

My half-watching of the recent conference, I had studying to do so I couldn't watch everything, gave me a couple of things to say about Labour, and surprisingly one is positive.
1. Ed Miliband can actually answer a question. I know, I'm as surprised as you but in his little "Question and answer" thing he did with an audience of members of the public he actually provided a decent answer to a question on outsourcing, pointing out that due to the global nature of the modern economy its hard to force firms to keep jobs here and its better to focus on trying to making Britain a better place to do business. I was actually impressed by how good an answer it was for a politician.
2. But not if the question is "how?". Seriously he mentioned lots of things he wanted to do but no ideas as to how he was going to do them. The one time he tried to provide an answer as to how was even worse than nothing, he suggested that the way to get young people into work was a bank bonus tax. While a bank bonus tax could help fund a method of getting young people into work its not actually a method in itself. I wouldn't be as miffed about this whole thing, but the man was talking about "restructuring our economy" to make it "[insert standard buzz words here]" and frankly the idea of someone trying to restructure the economy without a clear plan scares the hell out of me.

Now for the aforementioed moaning about protesters. Now while I generally agree with your cause, what I don't agree with is some of the more crazy participants of the protests in Manchester yesterday. Here is a quick list of things that don't help anything.
1. Trying to attack people simply for being conservatives having the audacity to try and enjoy some fresh air.
2. Chants about wanting an eighty five year old woman, who is not even relevant to the issues at hand, to die.
3. Littering. (Seriously, people live here)
4. Trying to incite others to break off the protest route and storm a conference, though admittedly this was just one crazy person with a megaphone who was mostly ignored.

And I will leave you with some wise words "If we amplify everything, we hear nothing".